NEW YORK — Four days after the sexual assault of an 18-year-old woman at a Brooklyn playground, prosecutors were poised Monday night to charge four teenagers with what officials described as a gang rape, officials said.
In a case that has grown more tangled by the day, investigators have been interviewing two of the suspects, holding two others and seeking a fifth suspect, all in an effort to piece together what happened Thursday night at Osborn Playground in the Brownsville neighborhood.
By late Monday, the police and prosecutors had not announced criminal charges in the case. But two law enforcement officials said the accounts of the suspects who had been interviewed had begun to answer some questions surrounding the attack, including how exactly the woman's father was driven away from his daughter's side at a moment of crisis.
The four suspects are expected to be charged as adults with rape, and, as the case moves to court, new information about the circumstances of the attack is expected to emerge.
On Monday, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, whose district covers the playground, said he was troubled by "several unanswered questions as it relates to the behavior of the father."
"Something does not seem to add up," he said.
The complexities did not shake the authorities from their original premise — that the 18-year-old suffered a violent attack at a playground near her home. The father said the teenagers entered the playground brandishing a gun, and that he ran off, the officials said. Two minutes later, he returned and threw a bottle at the teenagers, to try to drive them off, but they chased him again, the officials said. When he returned 12 minutes later with police officers, the assailants were gone and his daughter was there, half clothed.
When she was interviewed, the woman told investigators she was raped by at least one of the suspects, the officials said. She was forced to perform oral sex on two others, they said, citing her account, and all of the suspects touched her breasts.
"The initial report, that all five of them raped her, is not looking like it happened that way," one of the officials said.
Two of the suspects said a third suspect had sex with the woman. That suspect said he was present, but was on the phone, "and when he finished the call his friends were gone," one of the officials said.
The woman did not report seeing a gun and so far, the suspects have denied they had one. The father and daughter were heavily intoxicated during the attack, the official said.
The woman had several recent physical injuries, Stephen P. Davis, the department's top spokesman, told reporters Monday afternoon.
"She had cuts and bruises and abrasions which are consistent with being physically attacked," he said.
But Davis said it could take seven to 10 days for the results of a rape test performed on the woman to be known. "She had injuries consistent with an assault," he said, declining to go into additional detail about any injuries associated with a sexual assault or rape.
Two of the suspects, ages 14 and 15, were taken to a Brooklyn precinct station house by their mothers on Sunday, a day after the police released surveillance video of a group of young men entering a deli before the attack. The police found the video around 2 p.m. Saturday. After the mothers saw the video on television, they went to the police, Davis said.
The authorities then picked up a 15-year-old suspect for questioning, also on Sunday. A fourth suspect, 17, turned himself in, "knowing that we were looking for him," Davis said.
The deli surveillance video has proved to be the best clue in what has otherwise been an arduous investigation. Detectives began canvassing the area for video on Friday. Besides the distant footage of the father and daughter walking together into the park, near where they live, the police also found distant video of five figures leaving the park around the time of the attack.
"But it was nothing of any kind of value," Davis said. From there, he said, investigators "moved out" and eventually came up with the video from Zaida Deli and Grocery.
A clerk there, Feliz Santos, said the five young men had come in around 8:45 p.m. Thursday and bought 50-cent plastic bottles of bright red Big Burst Fruit Punch.
Only about 30 minutes later, though, workers at that deli and another apparently turned the woman's father away in succession.
At Zaida Deli and Grocery, the father said only, "Gimme the phone," Santos recalled, adding that he did not explain why.
Santos said he refused the man because he had no idea what he wanted and because the shop needed the phone for business. The father then continued on down the block.
The father stopped at Gaston Deli, two blocks from the park, and asked to use the phone, again without explaining why or even saying that he wanted to call the police, said Sammy, a clerk there. Sammy, who said he was busy with customers, told him no. He added that the father seemed drunk.
"How he look, how he act, how he sway," Sammy said.
The father's actions remained difficult to account for, but a picture emerged on Monday of the dark and difficult circumstances the woman had been living under. Neighbors at an apartment complex near Osborn Playground said that her father had been an alcoholic for years.
They said he did not supervise a young son who often played in the trash-strewn hallway outside the door of his apartment, leaving his older children to look after the boy. Clusters of empty 24-ounce cans of King Cobra malt liquor strewn in the hallway and stairwell had been left by him, they said.
"He's like that, a drunk, yes," said Bertha Payne, 44, who lives next door. She said he often knocked to beg for dollar bills and cigarettes.
Payne described the daughter as a kind and quiet young woman.
When Payne asked the father on Sunday how he was doing, she said he seemed baffled by the question.
"He said, 'I have no idea what they're doing around here,'" referring to the scrum of reporters and police officers nearby at the playground, Payne recalled. "He said, 'I didn't do nothing.'"